Kaiser’s home base is in Oakland, and in 1998 the company created a model for a Family Violence Prevention Program.

The initiative sought to identify domestic violence among patients and employees, and to provide both referrals and resources to help end the abuse.

The model was tested from 1998 to 2000 at the Kaiser Permanente Richmond Medical Center in Richmond, 10 miles northwest of Oakland.

Brigid McCaw, a family practice physician there, is in charge of both Kaiser’s program corporatewide and for Kaiser Permanente Northern California. She and other medical professionals created the pilot.

“I had worked in the emergency room at Richmond for a number of years and I would see victims of all kinds of violence, not just domestic violence,” McCaw said. “We felt that there must be something we could do for patients to prevent the abuse instead of just patching them up.”

Victims suffer abuse many times over a lifetime, she said. The question was, could Kaiser intervene and begin treatment earlier in the cycle in a health-care setting?

“We wanted to make it easy for the doctor to reach out to the patient and ask the right questions,” McCaw said.

Kaiser expanded the test from the Oakland pilot program to the entire northern California region from 2000 to 2002.

That region has 3.4 million members, 1 million of which are women between the ages of 18 and 65, those at highest risk for abuse. Kaiser has about 6,000 physicians among its 50,000 employees in the region.

The Family Violence Prevention Program became official in the region in 2005, and Kaiser began to expand the program companywide.

Susan Moriarty, a pediatrician in Columbia and executive director of Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States, is in charge of the region’s violence prevention program.